Mark Marino writes, “Boingers might be interested in this new free 3-week course I’m co-teaching with UnderAcademy College founder Talan Memmott: How to Write and Read Fake News: Journalism in the Age of Trump. It starts Jan. 20, of course.”

The smirking, villainous pharma-hedge-douche-bro Martin Shkreli (previously) bought the rights to the anti-parasitic drug Daraprim — used to treat malaria, a disease that disproportionately affects the poorest people in the world — and jacked the price from $13.50/dose to $750/dose.

The OECD’s 2011-2015, 33 country, 215,942-person study of computer skills paints a deceptively grim picture of the average level of computer proficiency around the world — deceptive because it excludes over-65s, who research shows to be, on average, less proficient than the 16-65 cohort sampled.

The Black Friday Mac Bundle 2.0 is one of the Boing Boing Store’s best-selling Mac bundles yet, and it’s about to come to an end. If you don’t get your copy now, here’s what you’ll be missing:This bundle comes packing 9 top-rated Mac apps in one package, at the hugely discounted price of just $23.99. […]

The Boing Boing Store’s Gift Guide is full of ideas for pretty much anyone in your life like hipster ice cub trays, Xbox controllers, Halo Boards, and even diamond necklaces. As always, all products in the Boing Boing Store come at great discounts, too. Shop by price bucket starting at under $20. Under $20:Bloxx Jumbo Ice Trays […]

Unlike traditional lighters, the SaberLight features an electronic plasma beam that’s both rechargeable and butane-free. This sleek lighter is even approved by TSA, so you’ll never be stuck buying lighters you’ll just have to throw away partially used. For some people, like me, this is a pretty big game-changer. The SaberLight’s beam is actually both hotter and cleaner […]

On the off chance that the question is serious, most schools send the actual document afterwards because too many graduates would otherwise get diplomas with other people’s names on them. All it takes is for one student to be out of place in line. True, people could read the name on the document and recover, but in the stress of handing out a few hundred of them, it’s hard to imagine mistakes not being made.

Because– at least at my high school and law school– you d0n’t get your final grades until after graduation so they can’t actually give you your diploma when you walk. My college had “senior week” where all the professors scrambled like mad to get senior grades in while we did things like go on cruises and go to Six Flags. I got my diploma at graduation.

At my high school, you got the empty diploma holder at the ceremony, and then you picked up your diploma after the ceremony in the library (which was the pre- and post- ceremony meet-up point, as part of the whole ceremony). This was so they didn’t have to worry about getting the right one for each person, while you still had an object to hold for the photo. They also didn’t have a list of names to read from, but rather each student was given an index card on which to write their name as they wanted it read. They would then carry this card during the ceremony and give it to the announcer at the side of the stage.

In all fairness, sometimes intelligent people like shitty books from time to time. I myself enjoy a wide range of topics and genera – but I also love terrible romance novels and I forced my way though the entire “Left Behind” series…it became masochistically delightful after book3….

Any bets that the transcript will be released, but will show prominently that she was denied the status of ‘graduate’ because of unspecified “indecent behaviour” at the ceremony? Never underestimate the vindictiveness of a small-town principal: the principal could easily make the word into four scarlet letters.

Heads have to justify their behaviour to the school governors. At my school the headmaster tried to expel the whole upper sixth form (150 pupils) for smoking drugs. He couldn’t tell which individuals were responsible. The governors made it quite clear that his position would be seriously compromised if he tried any such thing. This was just towards the end of the school year and would have prevented most of the sixth form sitting A-levels. There were no expulsions.

So does the school have a written policy against “profanity” that they used to withhold her diploma? If so, they’re much more seriously in violation of it themselves, so they need to let go of the diploma. If not, then their “make stuff up on the spot” policy really opens them up to trouble.

Also, does their profanity policy only cover profane use of Christian religious terms (or Christian, Muslim, and maybe Jewish?) Then they’ve got a more serious First Amendment problem than they realized, though it’s already a problem – the Abrahamic religions prohibit taking God’s name in vain (and by extension prohibit using other concepts from their religions profanely, and Christianity’s more explicit about that than Judaism is), while many other major religions don’t have equivalent prohibitions. (She could have said “By Jove, how would I know!?” and Jove’s followers wouldn’t have been offended. The Fair Folk might have been grumpy if she’d dissed them, but it’s a personal affront rather than a moral one. And the Buddha wouldn’t have been offended by her lack of enlightenment, though he’s got a wide enough range of followers that some of them might.)

You’re forgetting that to calculate the cultural era of a US town for each hundred miles from either LA or NYC you have to subtract 4 years from the current date, so Oklahoma is actually living through 1952 right now. Perhaps it is like Vernor Vinge’s “Zones of Thought” in his “Fire in the Deep” novel. The level of logical thought is limited by the geography…

I’m sending this message to you from Ann Arbor via singing telegram, since we haven’t advanced to the era of widespread internet access. Telegram should be sung to the tune of “FORGET YOU” by your contemporary vocal stylist Ceelo Green.

I’m glad I don’t get to hear about every stupid narrow-minded administrator’s control-trips and petty injustices, or I’d fucking drown in them. This barely deserves the emotional involvement worthy of a real free speech issue.

Except if you have a threshold for responding to erosion of your freedoms it WILL be exploited, so you gotta push back at least a bit every time. Eternal vigilance and all that.The least-effort solution is obviously to apologise, get diploma, and *then* publicly ridicule the school.

This is why our final exams don’t depend on a single individual or a single school for our final grades. People may hate our system (what kids don’t hate the system) but it is a hell of a lot fairer than this!

I very nearly got into a 2:00 a.m. brawl with a bunch of Okies when I told them that Oklahoma is called “The Sooner State” because the sooner you got the fuck out of it, the better. They were unable to provide a reasoned alternate theory.

I’m 6’5 and about 280. I stood up very straight and tall and made it pretty clear that I was a lot less drunk than the two of them, both runty, skeevy vermin, and the smarter of them (sic) was just wise enough to steer his buddy out of the Holiday Inn bar and out into the night.